Integral Reflections offers an extension of the ideas presented through "The Healing Project" website. These include the will to healing at personal, social, spiritual and environmental levels, the discussion of textual sources from which intellectual and spiritual nourishment can be drawn, the maintenance of a watching brief on the turbulent currents that course through the present times, and the exploration of poetic consciousness as a transmitter of the deeper dimensions of human experience.

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Wednesday, July 30, 2014

There Are No Good Wars

Gaza, January 2009

There is no such thing as a good war. Debates have been
carried on for centuries regarding the justness or otherwise of the declaration
and the prosecution of war, but every war has inevitably left devastated nations and convulsions of
misery in its wake.

The notion of war is loaded and complex. It is tinged with
elements of heroism and cruelty, of nobility and barbarism, of honour and
depravity, of idealism and cynicism. Acts of war are always enacted upon an other,
be that other an individual, a tribe or a nation. Inherent in such acts is a
conviction regarding the truth and the righteousness of one’s own position and
the error and worthlessness of that held by the other.

Yet no one group can ever be entirely aligned with the true
and the good regardless of the delusional rhetoric that springs from all sides
in justification for acts of war.

The process of civilisation has tempered the views of every
nation regarding the nature and purpose of war. It has generated castes and
institutions that willingly and consciously concern themselves with developing
an ethos to guide those who would take on the role of warrior or protector of
their people. This has been understood as necessary to ensure the safety and
security of those within the community who are not in a position to protect
themselves from the organised actions of hostile forces intent on destroying
the peace for whatever reason.

Even as a purely pragmatic response to the historic
experience of war and its consequences, the organisation of warrior castes and
their associated institutions has enabled the cultivation of disciplined
readiness, the capacity for skilled negotiation and, in its failure, a
preparedness to engage wilful and belligerent opponents skilfully, decisively
and fairly. Such institutions were developed during periods when warfare was
engaged face-to-face, warrior-to-warrior, field-to-field. One acted and reacted
in the field of battle and the effects of one’s skill and fortune - or lack thereof - were
immediately visible and irrevocable.

Gaza, November 2012

Everything has now changed. Rules of engagement may be
formulated and invoked, but acts of war as we have come to know them in the
present age are planned and executed at a distance by men who have never seen
the living face of war and its monstrous consequences. The clash of sabre on
sabre has been muted for centuries.

The booming of artillery and the
crackling of bullets have pierced and sundered the past twenty decades. The
slow dance of aerial engagement that once tested the reflexes and determination
of young pilots during the so-called Great War has been replaced by infernal
powers that thunderously impel silicon-guided missiles to their well-mapped
targets. And this is all done at a safe distance by those with the hardware and
the know-how.

But who truly knows the consequences of such acts apart from
those unfortunates in the line of fire, and those heroic individuals who
witness and document the human reality of what is otherwise counted in the
ledger of contemporary history as anonymous casualties and collateral damage?

The men who flew Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber that
dropped the sweetly named Little Boy into the lives of the people of
Hiroshima, witnessed - albeit at a distance - the immensity of their action. So
too did the crew of the Bockscar that delivered its terrible cargo Fat
Man to the unsuspecting women and children of Nagasaki three days later.

In the present disregard of such direct witnessing, F-16 fighter jets, remotely
controlled missiles, pilot-less drones and distant tanks deliver their lethal loads out of
sight and often out of mind of those who direct these deadly forces.

In this new perversion of warfare that has shaken and
shattered the nations of the earth over the past two centuries, it is ever the
innocents who have suffered most grievously. The true warrior has always lived
with the knowledge that his chosen role may cost him his life. But the great
majority of lives taken in contemporary acts of war are those of innocents.

The largely forgotten millions who were herded into the
killing camps of the Nazis, the hundreds of thousands who were flayed and ashed
in the fire-bombings of Dresden and Tokyo and in the atomic sackings of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the 500,000 children of Iraq whose young lives were
taken by the silent and covert consequences of twelve years of crippling
sanctions that kept a despot in power and a people exhausted, the hundreds
of thousands of lives that have been squandered in the Iraqi misadventure
driven by George Bush and Tony Blair, the thousands of families in Afghanistan
and Pakistan who continue to grieve the loss of their loved ones from past volleys of air-strikes, and the thousands of women and children blown apart in
Gaza from Operation Cast Lead in
2008/2009 to Operation Protective Edge
at the present time are all tragic witnesses to the fact that it has all gone horribly
wrong.

Gaza, July 2014

Rule by force can never succeed.
People can never be bludgeoned into peace. How long does it take to learn that
no one is entirely right, that no one is entirely wrong? How long will it take
before the cultivation of wisdom and sensitivity to the needs of those one
aspires to represent become high values in those who would lead their people?
How long must we wait before the principles of fairness, compassionate
advocacy, reasoned and reasonable negotiation and the acceptance of difference
become the keystones of political office and enlightened governance?

The times ahead will require precisely these attributes.

The
work has barely begun in the task of saving what yet can be saved and of
putting aside those entrenched practices that darken further an already
darkening future. The earth and her people have for too long now been lashed by
cruel assaults of increasing violence, power and destructiveness. Where will it end?Vincent Di Stefano D.O., M.H.Sc.July 2014

Two days after Christmas in 2008, the isolated and densely populated
city of Gaza was visited by volley upon volley of deadly missile and
mortar fire. The intense bombardment of one of the most densely
populated places on earth
continued unabated for a period of three weeks. By the end of the
assault, over 1,400 Palestinians had been killed and more than 5,000
wounded, many seriously. Between three and four hundred of the dead were
children. A total of 13 Israelis were killed during the same time, four
of them by the action of their own troops.

Slouching Towards Gaza offers both an audio presentation carrying the reflections from a number of informed commentators and a substantive essay in commemoration of the fifth anniversary of that tragic event.

We who live in regions of relative stability and prosperity in the
so-called developed world and who are free of the uncertainty and the
unpredictability that are part of daily life in war zones will
occasionally be startled out of our false sense of security and
certainty. Such occasions though generally rare, will often have a transformative effect on our lives. Yet we seem to
maintain our sense of privileged steadiness in the face of a constant
stream of disturbing images and reports that fill the electronic and
print media. Such images remind us daily of the reality of ongoing wars, the
horror of terror attacks, and the despair of vast numbers of families
and individuals who have left everything in order to seek refuge from
violence and danger, from ruined streets and houses, from bombs and
bullets.

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I have an ongoing commitment to healing in all its dimensions: personal, social, spiritual, political and environmental. Having now retired as an educator and practitioner in complementary medicine, my present interests turn to performance poetry, wrestling with William Blake's epic pieces, and a slow but steady translation of a number of Italian texts.